And the specific thing competition does to your brain, once you know about it, is hard to unsee.

We literally *stop being able to fluently access empathy* when our cognition is pointed at grouping the world into opposing sides. The more we see people as not as the complex individuals they are but as a flattened part of a rival group, the stronger these effects. The more we interpret group conflict as the stage for individual actions, the more our minds inhibit empathy.

Mina Cikara's research on intergroup competition (among others) documents that under competition conditions, the empathy gap between us and them can flip into something measurable as pleasure at the other side's failure. People surrounded by narratives of intergroup conflict are more likely to justify violence toward outsiders, and feel more schadenfreude at their misfortune.

We have powerful systems in our minds for empathy, but we also have systems that dampen empathy during threat.

But we can disrupt this zero-sum competition frame, and the healthiest groups learn how to do this. Some concrete strategies that work across the research:

- making people aware that groups are not monolithic in their social connections
- finding cross-cutting ties between members of "different" groups

and,
- invoking a group's own values against a harmful set of actions and holding one's group to a higher standard --> this one is a particularly fun area of work on "loyal dissenters"

Loyal dissenters, as studied by Dominic Packer, are people who strongly identify with their group but *are also capable of dissenting with their group's norms.* They are key agents of reshaping and moving groups toward better. They are, as he calls them in a delightful paper title, "rebels with a cause."

Disrupting the empathy dampening is absolutely possible, and the more you cultivate habits of empathy, the more you become willing to point out hypocritical groups, the more you play this role